Manzano's Zafira and the Performance of Cuban Nationhood

Manzano's Zafira and the Performance of Cuban Nationhood

Domingo del Monte's tertulia, which sought to define Cuban nationalism through literary imaginings, exemplifies Benedict Anderson's belief that the formation of nations is an act of collective will disseminated largely though the medium of writing (73). But the group's white Creole invention of nation was a truncated one that entertained in limited and generally figurative terms the direct participation of Cuba's majority population of color, even within the antislavery narratives it so vigorously cultivated. Despite his periodic mimicry of European models and efforts to placate the tertulia's white readership, Juan Francisco Manzano was engaging in an aesthetic—and political—dialogue with Enlightenment values and ideas of nation that were rather autonomous of white Creole designs. In his last major published work, and his only drama, Zafira: tragedia en cinco actos (Havana, 1842), Manzano responds to Creole literary fantasies of miscegenation as well as Hispanic literary traditions of colonization and delivers his own formula for sovereignty in Cuba, which I suggest holds obscured reference to the 1791 slave revolt of Saint Domingue (now Haiti) and the subsequent establishment of a black republic there in 1804.

Late eighteenth-century enlightened, liberal philosophy transformed the political landscape of Europe and sparked successful independence movements in much of Latin America. But nineteenth-century Cuba was characterized by fear and repression, tight censorship, and overt persecution. A series of factors on the island contributed to this continued squelching of autonomy, including what even Simón Bolívar had recognized as a tendency of the white population to remain loyal to the Spanish crown: "Although a handful of progressive individuals favoured independence from Spain, Cuba's economic elite was conservative, fearful of the economic and social consequences of a break with the colonial motherland" (Gott 52). Meanwhile, in Cuba and elsewhere in the Americas, slavery continued to exist in stark contradiction to the values of freedom and equality championed in new and restructured societies. The British impulse towards abolition resulted in its own legal termination of the slave trade, but Spain refused to discontinue its involvement in the practice, despite signing a treaty with Britain in 1817 to do so by 1820 (Gott 59). Moreover, although Spain passed a reformist constitution in 1836 for its own population, it denied the right of Cuba to participate in those reforms, expelled Cuban representatives from the Cortes in 1837, and determined instead that the island would be governed by special rules (Fischer 102).

While colonies and new nations in the Americas scrambled to find ways to justify the persistence of slavery in an age that made claims to human equality by birth, Haiti stood as a singular example of black freedom and political self-determination. Its existence in the midst of myriad slaveholding territories was unsettling at best. The slave revolt in Saint Domingue had pushed thousands of wealthy land and slave owners first into Spanish-held Santo Domingo and then into Cuba, bringing with them not only bloody stories of black rebellion that terrified Cuban owners, but also some of their own slaves. Cuba had tried repeatedly to prevent "French" slaves from entering the island in an attempt to prevent the events of Haiti from repeating themselves there. Cuba had suffered its own slave rebellions, which became increasingly frequent in the early nineteenth century. It is difficult to say how many of those were directly influenced by the events in Haiti (Gaspar and Geggus 4–5, 13–18).¹ But in white minds, the connection was presumed, and this perpetual fear of slave agency, along with concerns about Creoles seeking independence determined the repressive character of a series of Cuban governorships like that of Francisco Dionisio Vives (1823–1832) and General Miguel Tacón Rosique (1834–38): "Éste, que había apurado la hiel de la derrota en Sur América, trajo con sus amargos rencores la firme...